There’s an edge-of-the-seat moment every four minutes
The Capture
BBC1, Sunday & Monday (Warning: contains spoilers) ★★★★★
Mortimer And Whitehouse: Gone Fishing
BBC2, Friday ★★★★★
The first series of the surveillance thriller The Capture was the BBC’s most downloaded series of 2019, and if this second series doesn’t prove the most downloaded of 2022 I’ll eat my hat, your hat, any hat. If, that is, hats actually exist. Can you ever believe what you see? Written by Ben Chanan, this is up there with Line Of Duty or Bodyguard as it’s so grippingly twisty, with edge-of-your-seat moments happening, on average, every four minutes. (That first Newsnight interview! And the second!)
You don’t need to have watched the first series, but if you haven’t I would, particularly as there’s something DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) hid at the end of it that has since gone missing. I can’t now lay out the plot in detail. It’s so complex and doublecrossy that if I did we’d be here until a week next Thursday. If Thursdays exist.
But, essentially, Carey is back and now working for a secret government department that manipulates CCTV footage (‘correction’) so it shows what they want it to show. She is self-righteous but also has a conscience; she wants to expose them, and is watching them while they are watching her.
The other main character this time is a politician, Isaac Turner, played spectacularly by Paapa Essiedu. At the outset he is the minister for security who has to decide if China should run Britain’s facial-recognition software. No, he decides, but at the end of the first episode there he is on Newsnight, saying ‘yes’, even though he’s nowhere near the studio. Who is causing this deep-fake mayhem? The Chinese, we initially think, then it’s the Americans, now it’s the Russians. Or is it personal? Is someone purely out to destroy Turner? Four episodes in (of six) and there have been many terrific twists. That second Newsnight interview. The hospital assassination. We spent 30 minutes watching a car on its way to Heathrow that didn’t end up at Heathrow because there was no car. This also has a clever script and puts in the character work. Ron Perlman is an American agent who may be developing a conscience now he’s been diagnosed with a terminal disease. The scene where he visited a rabbi, who told him he must take charge of his redemption, was very affecting. Will he crack?
As for Turner, he has all but been destroyed. To others he appears as if he’s gone mad – ‘It wasn’t me!’ – and he may genuinely go mad. He’s been sacked from government. A woman claims to have had his baby. His family has fallen apart. Episode four ended with him holed up in a hotel room when there’s a knock at the door. He looks through the peephole and, get this, sees himself on the other side. How is that possible? How? (Oh God, he doesn’t have an identical twin, does he? Wouldn’t it be cheating if he did?)
He is now in cahoots with Carey to expose correction. She is filming everything with a little button, he is filming everything through his tie. But I ask you, even though they have footage of the home secretary fessing up, couldn’t they be accused of faking that? Two episodes to go and, in the meantime? Trust nothing. And nobody.
Elsewhere, as Aidan Turner’s Dr Joe O’Loughlin continues to protest his innocence (UTV’s The Suspect) it turns out that on the night of the murder he wasn’t stumbling
around Soho drunk, as claimed. Instead, he was having sex with a sex worker who had been his client. Nice work, Joe! I kind of hope he’s banged up even if he is innocent, and his wife runs off with the plumber. The sooner the better. So let’s move on quickly to Mortimer And Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, which returned for a fifth series and is as wonderfully soothing and delightful and touching and funny as ever. Whitehouse is the true fisherman, while Mortimer mostly falls over a lot. They rarely, if ever, catch anything. This could even be called The Non-Capture. They begin this series in Devon, by the River Exe and the Bristol Channel, where it’s so quiet, says Bob, ‘you can actually hear a little mouse putting its paw into a handbag’.
It’s small talk like this that can go deep. Mortality is often on the agenda – they’ve both had heart problems – but does having a healthy lunch (veggie burgers) earn you the right to ‘a pork pie and a Calippo [lolly]’? Bob is the one for surreal flights of fancy, like his mystic pebble-reading. ‘Pick three pebbles, Paul… the smallest pebble is your libido, and you can see it’s fading very quickly.’ There is also a discussion about the best trousers. ‘Have you discovered the elasticated waistband, Paul? The elasticated waist man is a happy man…’
I’ve only discovered that the show has its own website where you’ll find a number of Bob’s recipes – he’s always the cook – including a cauliflower pilaf that sounds like a faff as you must wring the cauliflower grains in muslin, but it does come with the assurance: ‘You will look magnificent during this process.’ Might be worth a try? PHILIP NOLAN IS AWAY